Book Review: The Dark Forest, Book Two of Remembrance of Earth's Past, by Cixin Liu

21 Sunday May 2017

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My mind has been expanded significantly by the first two books of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The scale and scope of the undertaking is truly on par with the greatest science fiction I’ve ever read. Hard science and theoretical ideas run deep, but remain very human and rational.

It’s a syncretic hyper-extension of the way we think and behave pushed into a highly orchestrated future that requires deep conceptualization to imagine.

Comparisons to Asimov are apt.

Cixin Liu boldly describes human culture and philosophy facing impending first contact with an alien race that has advanced technology with a richness of supposition and detail that captures a wide range of human emotion and response. He does this with very few characters and an elaborate, all-encompassing style. The details are exceptionally well thought-out.

The setup incorporates the vast distances in space and a nuanced portrayal of human society dealing with an enemy about whom little is known and who will not arrive to attack for hundreds of years.

I am continually taken aback at the breadth of this work. Liu’s narrative is centuries long. It’s on the scale of James Blish (Cities in Flight) or, as has been noted, Frank Herbert (Dune).

While humans invent cryogenic hibernation and a space armada and other standard responses of sci-fi to deal with this situation, there are unique circumstances.

The sophons, a pan-dimensional use of protons that travel across space, arriving at Earth to unfold and manipulate our reality, was a mind-blowing central concept of The Three-Body Problem. In Book Two, Liu posits Wallfacers and their companion Wallbreakers as a complex reaction to this tactic of the Trisolarans.

Since the Trisolarans can see, read and influence human behavior, the only safe space to shield anything from them is within the human mind. The Wallfacers are created and tasked with never writing anything down, never explaining what they do or why they do it to anyone. They embark on their plans to resist the Trisolarans independent of social and military planners. Wallfacers become the central pre-occupation of The Dark Forest. It is conceptually impressive and flourishes into a great plot.

The Trisolarans do not make any significant appearance until the climactic battle at the end of this volume and are peripheral players throughout. This allows Liu to explore humanity through the behavior – and responses to the behavior – of the Wallfacers in a way that is totally original.

So now Liu has to describe humanity’s initial response – filled with variety: those who give up, those who would fight, those who would defect to the enemy – and to posit the extension of all these reactions 200 years into the future.

It’s galactic in scale and all just a little hard to swallow by the time you get to the division of this book between Earth of the late-20th/early 21st century and human culture of the year 2200. But to Liu’s credit The Dark Forest is more human and relationships are deeper, more sensitive and believable.

Cixin Liu grew significantly as a writer between the two works. He takes on the psychology of humanity faced with the cosmic situation he has created and works through abstract philosophical responses to create a range of believable, if summarized, cultural changes in us.

I liked The Dark Forest better than The Three-Body Problem because Liu goes further to extrapolate his visions of how humanity behaves in the face of the complex circumstance he has created. He includes and fills-out more intimate reactions and attempts to create a broad image of us and how we react – intelligently but oh, so human.

The Wallfacer Project is the primary mechanism for this. That the story advances 200 years in a leap of human culture is the second. Without giving too much away, allow me to say that many of the characters manage to hibernate and emerge hundreds of years later which results in a fascinating conceit:

Liu convincingly describes near-future humans who have survived post-Trisolaran contact. They’ve endured The Great Ravine – an epic depression of global scale that reduced human population by billions – and an era that forced most cities underground. Their tech is smart.

But this future human society is confronted daily by waking up hibernators, characters we know and appreciate from our time, awakened on schedule to proceed with the ultimate plan of Earth’s defense. It creates a truly original relationship between us and our future selves.

In some ways Liu’s future human relationships are a near-perfect emulation of contemporary generational relationships between the Digital Generation and anybody over 40. The clunky 21st-century hibernators call them “kids” though they’re a highly advanced civilization.

The Dark Forest is considerably more about philosophy, politics and social and military strategy than The Three-Body Problem, which was more computing and science. But it’s pretty heady stuff.

All of it is headed toward first contact and when the 2000-spacecraft-strong armada of Earth finally meets the first craft from Trisolaris, the story doesn’t disappoint. So many previous steps have led to this moment in our narrative, they unfold like the petals of a blooming flower as the action explodes. The battle is a brilliant sequence.

We come now to a principle failing of this work. The conclusion of volume two is meant to bring a suspension at last to first contact, but the solution that achieves this was, to me, a disappointment. When it finally happens, I wondered why it hadn’t come sooner to us to approach the problem this way.

I’m obviously trying to critique here without giving anything away, so I’ll conclude with a metaphor from another saga.

I used to love trolling fans of The Lord of the Rings by saying, “Put the ring in a box. Give it to the Eagles. Tell them to drop it in the fires of Mordor. End of story in 20 minutes.” After all, the Eagles easily defeat the winged Fellbeasts of the Nazgul in the great war of Middle Earth, they’d have no problem getting by them to rid the world of the ring.

Sometimes a simple plot hole can take away the power of a saga, so you have to avoid it to go on, and to enjoy the ride.

I hate to say it, but when the final philosophical and cosmological play is made in the battle between Earth and Trisolaris – elaborate and complex as it is – I saw it coming.

I really, really want to elaborate with anyone who has read these two.

Off to read Book Three, Death’s End!

mtk

The Outsider Inside – a short film

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in fiction, Oakland, performance, S.F., short film

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“The Academy and the Government are always the last, the very last, to state the truth.”

– Dr. Robert Brooks

a narrative short fiction about two academics, one an invited guest of the other, who meet in the SF Bay and discuss aspects of the state of the world, briefly, but disagree.

produced and directed by M.T. Karthik
camera/lighting by Jason F. Rosencrantz
edited by MTK (with JFR); written by MTK (with JFR and Lloyd Dangle)
starring: James Earle as Dr. Robert Brooks, MTK as Dr. Raj Balas
and acting as “the students”: Lloyd Dangle, Walt Tanner and A.P. Ferrara

with Chris as the bartender and DJ Consuelo on decks
music: Alma de cera by Abel Duêrê, undercooled by Ryuichi Sakamoto, zigga zigga bite off 3 Feet High and Rising by de la soul, piano track by Vijay Iyer

thanks to OAK airport and KoKo’s Lounge

1Q84: Mid-Career Murakami and the New York Publishing Biz

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by mtk in Book Review, essay, reviews, social media

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In San Francisco, in the Mission District, between 1993 and ’95, I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood. He was then only recently translated into English and popular in San Francisco.

Those early novels were unpredictable, well crafted and defied genre. Murakami’s talking cats, imploding houses, slight shifts in perception of reality – and his cool characters’ natural acceptance of deep, scalar trips through levels of that reality – became a genre of their own.

His characters and prose paralleled in literature the malaise, disaffection, vapidity and bored waiting game of the end of the 20th century and then transcended it with fantastic departures from the world. The ride was like manga without the images or a purely textual Miyazaki Hayao animation epic just for single, young adults.

I first read A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami’s third novel, written in 1982, in San Francisco when I was 25. It remains my favorite. I remember feeling incredibly small in the face of the universe as his characters were pushed around.

I have a reverent fascination with Japan and a profound respect for her people. In my lifetime Japan was the most Americanized among all Asian countries, so growing up in the US, I was allowed slightly greater exposure to her writers.

Among Japanese novelists, I’d read Kawabata since I was a teenager, and in university covered Mishima and Akutagawa. I hadn’t yet read the post-war existentialists, when I picked up Murakami. Banana Yamamoto’s Kitchen was the hot new wave hitting California from the land of the rising sun.

Murakami was immediately different: pop synthesis of West and East through a contemporary urban Japanese socio-cultural lens.

Haruki Murakami began writing novels at the age of 29, in 1978, and has told Bomb Magazine, “Before that, I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.”

Wiki states he had a sudden epiphany during a baseball game:

In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat.

… in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on Hear the Wind Sing for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar. He completed the novel and sent it to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, winning first prize.

Now I’m 45 and Murakami’s 65, so we both remember 1984, the year in which his newest novel, 1Q84, is partially set. We have also both lived through an era that has seen the realization of some of the socio-cultural horrors described in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, which 1Q84 uses as a sort of launching point.

My loudest use of Orwell’s work was on the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, in 2002, as a performance element of the art installation US=THEM, in Los Angeles, I read Orwell’s 1984 aloud in its entirety in a book store gallery, beginning at 5:35am (the time the first plane struck WTC2) and ending just as the sun set on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. I printed slap tags that read 2002=1984 and stuck them everyplace.

I was excited to hear Murakami was using Orwell as a point of reference, and assumed the work would have socio-political overtones. I hoped 1Q84 would be more openly political and less personally intimate than the love stories he’d been writing. I consider Orwell to have been ahead of his time, so I was biased by the title’s obvious reference.

The particularly Asian coolness and practicality of Murakami’s characters in every day life is inspiring. But from the first, I felt his work was limited by the use of first-person narrative, usually with a narrator who seemed very much like himself: a middle-aged Japanese man living in Tokyo and underwhelmed by normal existence.

Murakami’s male narrators, all roughly his age, made the work light-weight. His contemporaries in late-20th century fiction writing in and translated into English: Garcia-Marquez, Eco, Kundera, Bowles, Ondaatje, Atwood, Boyle, Kureishi, DeLillo, Roth, Rushdie, Oates, Bolaño didn’t succumb to this basic approach.

As a writer, I’d come to the conclusion that my fiction suffered from my inability to write effectively in third person. I was biased by instructors and Modernism away from the trend toward first-person narratives written for the Me Generation. Murakami had no such bias, and neither, it turns out, did the publishing industry.

Murakami was young when he began and was thrust into the international limelight very quickly because of the accessibility of his work and his remarkable imagination. He was rewarded for making it easy to read. He was rewarded immense audiences for his references to Western pop, to “classical music” and to the boozy freedom of post-modern urbanity.

Haruki Murakami’s narrators’ exceptional breaks from the normative were what thrilled – these crazy trips into the unreal experienced coolly by his characters.

As a straight, booze-drinking, single, urbanite in my twenties (pre-metrosexuals) Murakami’s meals, drinks and one-night stands were a blast, in some cases a relief from the moralizing of political correctness.

I have sometimes felt targeted by novelists. Some just succeed in getting it. I wouldn’t discover Pepe Carvalho until a decade later, but Spanish readers will appreciate the comparison to Montalban. We used to joke about a drinking game in which you take a drink every time a Murakami character does. It gets harder to finish the book.

I only begrudgingly got into Murakami’s use of Western cultural tropes as described within an East Asian urban society, which Murakami was “first-to” in terms of crossover, and which he uses abundantly like a signature.

As an Indian living in the U.S. and Asia, who studied Ronald Takaki then, this was unappealing, I hated what post-post-modernism was becoming. But by the late ’90’s crosshatching Asia and the West had flooded the field. Murakami and Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino and Miyazaki Hayao made it cool. Sensible. At last, Asians outside London and New York were exhibiting what Hanif Kureishi knew, was called insouciant for writing.

It was inevitable at the dawn of the Internet and the globalizing 21st century. Haruki Murakami, the runner, from the longest US-occupied part of Asia, Japan; the novice writing in Japanese, first-person about being single, urban and sexually liberated was the first high-reaching Asian to just go ahead and run with it. Straight into the 21st Century.

I’m generalizing, but proposing Murakami was the best-seller who embodied the literary trend toward first-person narrative form and made it cool for Asian writing to love the West. Rushdie’s Ground Beneath Her Feet, must’ve been influenced in some small part by what Murakami was carving out.

Initially turned off by the brazen professing involved in it, I began to embrace Murakami’s careful choices of European orchestral music and western movies, TV shows and pop songs appropriated to both metaphorize, translate and drive narrative on multiple tiers. But creatively it always struck me as an easy way to force structure.

I was least impressed by Norwegian Wood. It struck me as a soap opera written for a specific audience of romantics. So after finishing it, I passed on a few of Murakami’s books and embarked on other, pretty heavy, post-war Japanese novels: Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human; Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes; and Saiichi Maruya’s contemporary classic, A Mature Woman.

I returned to Murakami in 2005 with the publication of Kafka on the Shore, which was my summer read while living on a Japanese shore, in Kamakura.

Again impressed by the proficiency with language, I liked the poetics and the magical, even spiritual, feel, but I remained disappointed by what struck me as basically a first-person, relationship story. Murakami was still pushing western tropes through to the title page and writing less political, getting more pop.

That’s my experience with Murakami’s work. I am not qualified to review 1Q84 as anything other than a reader of novels for 30 years. I do not pretend to understand him as a man, nor have I read much about him or his method, barring what’s been published in the New Yorker here and there.

In some small part this will also be a discussion of the state of the publishing industry in 2012 which has carefully produced ‘Murakami, the technically proficient, edgy yet non-threatening Asian romantic fantasist’ into an internationally best-selling novelist.

Though I’ve lived in Japan, I cannot read Japanese and so have experienced all the Japanese novelists only in translation to English.

1Q84 – translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel – was published by Knopf as a massive, 944-page, case-bound Borzoi, with a vellum slip cover designed by Chip Kidd that lightly masks close-ups of two Japanese faces, a female on the front and a male on the back, on October 25th of last year (2011) and sold for $30.

I found one in great condition for $18 earlier this summer at one of the used book stores I help stay in existence. I finished it last week.

The paperback and e-versions have been available for some time now and I began to wonder whether this form of publication is ever really being read, cover-to-cover. The thing is a doorstop, a bookcase brace, a coffee table weight, but reading it’s awkward, heavy and very hard to conceal.

Lugging this anvil around the past few weeks, I was stopped and asked about it many times in the street. One guy stopped pedaling his bike, going up a hill to stop me and ask, “Is that the new Murakami?’ Is it good?” Waiters, bartenders and waitresses at all my local coffeeshops, bars and restaurants asked and showed anticipatory excitement about this big, pretty thing.

I was sure the novel was being read … but figured the vast majority of that reading was happening in multiple parts as separate books in paperback, or in a digital format. I’ve never wanted an e-reader more than in these past few weeks lugging around 1Q84, with its slippery vellum cover.

Which brings us to the design by Chip Kidd and to why it was sitting pretty, marked down 30% at the used bookstore within eight months of publication.

On November 11th of last year, two weeks after its publication, Rachel Deahl raved in Publisher’s Weekly Knopf’s High-End Print Package for ‘1Q84’ Pays Off:

“But Knopf, which published the title late last month, has not only turned the book into a bestseller, it’s also managed to reverse another trend: it has made the book more popular in print than in digital.

“According to numbers released by the publisher, the novel, which was at #2 on the Times bestseller list on November 13, has sold 75,000 copies in hardcover, and 25,000 in digital. Those impressive print sales are thanks, in large part, to an extravagant package that Knopf put together that has made the book the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”

The design is horrible.

The lettering of the title is put on two lines so that the 1Q is above the 84, rather than written like a year: 1Q84. The result is that everyone who knows nothing about the book thinks its title is I.Q. 84 – which is hilarious and sad.

The vellum cover and the bold, sans-serif font make it worse. It’s so done-already. The design completely fails to help make Murakami’s connection between 1984 and 1Q84. (oddly, so does Murakami within, so perhaps it’s a case of too-good design)

The faces on the cover aren’t the author but face-models, and the vellum Kidd asked for that’s received so much praise, serves to mask their Japanese-ness, while retaining the sexy – fashion! haute couture!

The endsheets and chapter title pages continue the idiocy of separating the numbers of the title out, making it more disassociated than ever from Orwell. These pages are all black and white photographic backdrops of twilight and of the moon, which plays a significant role in the book, but though highly-stylized, they’re cheaply produced and the graphic elements aren’t even like the descriptions by the author within, which are specific about the appearance of the moon. Design sensibility invades literature again.

ugh. It’s whorish and stupid and has received nothing but praise and exaltation for Knopf and Chip Kidd for 8 months.

“the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”

sigh.

In the late-’90’s when I was working as a low-wage proofreader, fact-checker, jacket-designer and researcher in the New York publishing industry while trying to get published myself, at nights and on the weekends I also worked to help found a non-profit artists book organization in Brooklyn.

It was bizarre: by day, I’d be using new digital tools to make mass-produced work flashier, more-designed, more image-oriented, less text-heavy, while at night and on the weekends I helped produce fine art books with traditional materials in limited edition.

The turn of the millennium in New York City brought the consolidation of publishing and birthed the end of the book as we know it. What happened with 1Q84 last year was that it was sold as a sculptural object to great success. They made it into something you could market at Xmas whether anyone read it or not.

But appreciating the work within is made more difficult by the immense distraction of these new marketing methods, which crowd the work with the gushing sycophancy of non-readers buying sculpture.

END PART ONE

and now,

a poll:

PART TWO: 1Q84, Murakami Tries Third Person

1Q84 is Murakami’s first novel in third person. It succeeds in reaching for high ground, but weaknesses are revealed by the more difficult form. Some of these may be solely a result of translation issues, but whatever made it happen, at points it’s unbearable.

1Q84 is overwritten. It could easily be two-thirds the length. There may be perhaps no single person or department to blame for this.

It could be issues of translation. Having two different translators may have contributed to the repetition of ideas as each attempted to infuse their read. Throughout the work slipshod word choices are not just used but repeated awkwardly.

I hated the choice of the word “jacket” rather than “sleeve” for record covers. It isn’t wrong but it just sounds clunky in repetition – and the term is repeated within a paragraph without replacement when “sleeve” or “cover” would work so much better. The translation seemed rushed and simple. I presume this added pages.

It could have been a bad editor at Knopf, unwilling or unable to realize that when you publish three books in the same series from another language into one book sometimes there will be an absurd number of repetitions of basic points because when the work was originally published, these points were repeated to bring in new readers at each stage of publication.

I haven’t read any other reviews of this book, but I gather from the PW clip that this was the NYT’s problem.

It could be the fault of Knopf, itself, which seems to have rushed to shove the book out the door fast for Xmas season of last year, using cheap, flashy design to create a book to be sold as a sculptural object. They didn’t care what was in it as much as what was on it, what it looked and felt like. It could easily have been rushed for sales and cheated of the requisite time and effort required for editing and translation.

These possibilities notwithstanding, the responsibility for quality of the work lies with the author and Murakami’s attempt at third person results in common problems for anyone embarking on the daunting task of writing a proper novel: you must get inside the characters to let them live, but you mustn’t show you are inside the characters for them to live.

One sophomoric method used to achieve this for several decades is italics to represent the thoughts and inner monologues of a character. If it absolutely has to be done, then this is the accepted practice. Oh, I’m getting pedantic! I hope they’ll understand what I mean, that you should be able to write your characters into what you’re trying to convey and not have to rely on italicized font to tell the reader something important, oh, maybe I’m just nitpicking. M.T., you’re such an oppressive rationalist.

But just like the flashback has become nauseatingly common to drive narrative in movies since Pulp Fiction, usage of italicized thoughts has become standard in novels in third-person in this, the era of the first-person narrrative. It’s a failure on the writer’s part, or at least a CYA move. If you have to do it as a writer, you make it count.

Not so in IQ84.

Murakami’s discomfort with form leads to an unending parade of italicized thoughts. No character goes mentally uninvaded. Like the first-person narrative before, Murakami is shaking off rules again in this attempt at third-person narrative. This could be considered bold, I suppose, but not by me.

What was bold was the whole new dimension added when Murakami decided to have these characters thinking in italics about quotes. These sections are actually italicized and bolded. I don’t mean once or twice at climactic moments, but throughout the entire novel; nearly every character.

Murakami has characters read a number of different texts aloud to each other. This is in and of itself bizarre because references to existing texts, like Chekov could have been made “off-the-page” rather than being read aloud between two characters.

The point of using the Chekov could have been made in action, or through literary tactics, leaving the text itself as a support floating in literary space. In some cases these non-fiction texts are literally the full repetition of historical data as bedtime stories, simply so they can be referred to in future chapters – clunky. It’s also demeaning to readers.

In the case of notes read aloud between and within the minds of characters, Murakami doesn’t even let the note exist as the exchange. The note is quoted by a character within his or her own thoughts! Murakami and the translators use bold text within the italicized thoughts to display the character working out the meaning in their own thoughts. It’s either genius beyond me or annoying filler because you can’t convey what you mean.

The repetitions continue, almost as though when ‘occupying’ one character or another, Murakami has forgotten that another character has made a point … and so he repeats that point. At first, I thought this was because the book, like works of Murakami’s in the past, was going to get fantastically multi-layered and these would echo. But that never happens. It’s just repetitive.

1Q84 is also a little predictable, despite it’s imaginative elements. I saw the intersection of the lead characters Tengo and Aomame coming long before it was clear they were intertwined. I wondered if Tengo was authoring Aomame into existence, so I could see clearly through to Murakami himself.

I lay all of this at the feet of the shift to the third-person narrative. It’s hard to do. That is why I think Murakami is at mid-career despite having written so many novels and achieving such success. Murakami strikes me as a hard-working perfectionist who will likely tackle third-person narrative form again rather than shy away from it after a first-rate attempt. I look forward to his progress, and as usual, will be among the millions reading his flights of fancy.

I enjoy Murakami’s precise, technical prose, like describing a meal or a piece of music. I admire what Murakami does well: creating translucent, shimmering waves of realities that both define and filter how his characters perceive of reality.

I enjoy his detailed descriptions of events of the past – like war and post-war conditions, laden with contemporary attitudes about those events. Certain simplicities like descriptions of the natural world, Murakami just nails – his cicadas take me to Japan in summer:

Haruki Murakami continues to display a brilliant imagination and wild ideas. He weaves his plot streams together beautifully. Though some of the unpredictability has gone as a result of our familiarity with his tactics, Murakami has invaded our consciousness with his genre.

Unfortunately 1Q84 as it stands is too long, in parts very repetitious, somewhat clunky, and as a result, boring. I give it a 3 out of 5.

In Conclusion: The NY Publishing Industry’s Horrible Now

As I write these words from my home in California, the Nobel Committee prepares to announce its highly political and socially-influenced choices and the New York publishing industry is preparing to launch any number of new 1Q84s to push forward their bottom lines in this year’s Xmas season – some new sculptural objects whose contents are mostly recycled scraps and cardboard, rather than goose down and gold. Orwellian indeed.

For people living in California and Asia and with concerns about the works from these places, these two events in Scandinavia and on the East Coast of the US have little bearing. They have proven themselves wholly out of touch. While here and in Japan we fight to author a new world.

We must bring ourselves up out of what post-post-modernism and its failed capitalist globalism has wrought.

Read, read, read. Think, think, think. Enough with the gushing sycophancy – the world is headed down a dark road by our ignorance and selfishness.

As readers, we must demand better product; better editors, translators and deciders of what gets put into our hands.

Seek out authors from independent publishers, read blogs, comment.

Be critical.

Thanks,

mtk

September 29, 2012, Oakland, California

Explaining Prometheus and the ‘Alien’ Timeline

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by mtk in essay, reviews

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**8,500+ hits (as of Apr ’14) from around the world to this post, which was written when it first opened in theaters. Please do answer poll. Thanks**

The writer William Gibson recently tweeted (@GreatDismal) that he’s also noticed strong and divided opinions about Director Ridley Scott’s new science fiction spectacular, Prometheus, in theaters now.

Gibson tweeted on June 14th: “Split on Prometheus (which I haven’t seen) is vast and deep, with smart friends on both sides. In that situation, there’s often something going on with the dichotomy.”

Similar critique surrounded Scott’s Alien three dozen years ago and Bladerunner received the same treatment when it came out in 1982; the producers felt disrespected. On the DVD of the Director’s cut, with commentary, one of them snarls that Gandhi won the award for Best Costume Design over Bladerunner that year.

What if Ridley Scott’s worst crime is he’s a visionary unable to express ideally within the constraints of Hollywood’s demands and thus left us with a mess to interpret? Over the years in sci-fi we’ve considered far less quality product with far more attention.

Here’s excerpts of interviews with screenwriter Damon Lindelof and some actors from the film (not Ridley Scott, who is pretty closed-mouthed), that reveal a lot of this movie was edited out for the time constraints of Hollywood’s ‘Summer Blockbuster Marketing Mentality’.

This certainly has contributed to the confusion. Lindelof goes so far as to say that in Hollywood they just don’t want a movie to last more than two hours. The run-time is 2:03.

Frustrated fans have a right to be upset if this is true. A story takes time to tell. Marketers and groovy executives must be kept out of the calculation when it comes to run-time.

We’ll see if future extended versions and Director’s cuts of Prometheus flesh out the film. I propose we have to work harder to imagine the story wholly, but that it’s worth it.

To describe the story in Prometheus, Alien and Aliens taken together, I’ll use both my own writing and plot synopses written by others. [Prometheus from IMDB by WellardRockard; Alien by Colin Tinto].

Please respond to this poll of your thoughts on the film:

The “Other” Comments

Nine poll respondents used “other” to comment:

“both awesome and full of shortcomings,”

“Intense, positive for sure, but lacks full disclosure. Leave em wanting more?!”

“amazing brilliant movie.”

“Expecting more than a thinly disguised Alien remake.”

“Lot of plot holes and overall inconsistencies”

“Great. and visual!”

“I fell Asleep Watching it “

“flawed.”

“lacking information”

Explaining Prometheus

Ridley Scott is an avant-garde of the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas.

I say Ridley Scott is avant-garde in the context of a continuum of sci-fi film-making that begins with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg’s hand was what made the genre more popular until Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.

In Alien, his breakout, Ridley Scott established a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of the film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.

Perhaps Scott’s failing, if it can be called that, is avant-garde-ism coupled with a density of information that startles and cows some contemporary viewers, preventing appreciation of the work the first time through.

A second major problem seems to be an issue of control over editing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof was meant to bring human dimension to Scott’s immense vision, but it sounds like much of the tempo and dialogue required to do this ended up on the cutting room floor.

It requires imagination to appreciate imagining of this scale and one has to have two things to enjoy the movie: a willingness to wholly go on the ride, and active interpretation of subtle motivations described in a limited fashion by the cut.

I’m definitely eager for the Director’s Cut, which I hope will be a vastly improved film.

(editorial note: the death of Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, within weeks of the release of Prometheus, must have interrupted any post-release work)

The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man

Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being – perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer – drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.

I gather this from the title sequence of Prometheus. This Engineer’s DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.

An oblong shape is seen above him in the sky – a ship? It appears to be getting smaller, leaving? I wondered whether he was being left here to commit suicide?

2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers

A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these oversized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among ruins and archaeological sites of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures.

Shaw and Holloway divine a location in space to associate with the star pattern. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners – an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.

Throughout his career, Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, save Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien films, are sound.

The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They achieve interstellar travel via cryogenic suspension with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.

2093, the Prometheus plot

Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.

The ship’s crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages in order to translate for possible interactions with humanity’s makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.

Note: One flaw is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away. (wormholes?)

The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters. He constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience – and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi blockbusters of the past.

In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripley’s stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we’ve the aging hubris of Jurassic Park‘s Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, and the billionaire boys’ club attitude, ever-forward pushing like Contact‘s S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt. There’s a movie sci-fi continuum.

Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating, demanding CEO, the inventor (of David) and aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.

In Prometheus, there’s continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it.

The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given much depth, and it’s painfully obvious that the “Hollywood Summer Blockbuster” cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn’t good. That’s not easy and folks don’t like doing it.

That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It’s revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. In making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This is what Weyland saw in her.

Holloway, her atheist colleague and lover is, for his part, unbothered, he loves her and would do anything to pursue her interests. Holloway’s faithless willingness to do anything leads to his doom.

In 2093, the ship arrives in the orbit around LV-223. This is not the same planet first seen in Alien (1979) and in Aliens (1986) as confirmed by Ridley Scott in an interview on Friday June 1st on BBC radio 5 live.

Alien is set on LV-426, or Acheron, while Prometheus is set on a moon of LV-223.

After being awakened from hibernation, the crew are informed of their mission to find the ancient aliens, the “Engineers”. They also view a holographic message from Weyland himself, which tells them that he, Weyland, has since died, but that he has funded the mission under the direction of the scientists.

The Weyland hologram introduces Shaw and Holloway to the others, and the two explain what they have discovered and their intention to respond to what they perceive of as an invitation from humanity’s creators.

The other scientists are agog at the scale of the mission and the geologist Fifield and biologist Milburn express real skepticism. Mission director Meredith Vickers orders all present to avoid any direct contact if the Engineers or any other aliens are found.

The Prometheus lands near an alien structure and a team including Shaw, Holloway, and David explores it, while Vickers and Captain Janek remain aboard the ship and monitor their progress.

Flying drone scanners are employed to zoom through the immense curved structure beaming red, analytical light across the interior surface and allowing 3d mapping to be simulated as a visual model back on Prometheus and the data to be shared among the scientists simultaneously – rad.

The explorers find breathable air within the alien structure, discover hundreds of vase-like artifacts and a monolithic statue of a humanoid head. Other bodies are later found, and the Engineers are presumed to be extinct.

Using his polyglothic array of ancient languages, David sorts out how to use the controls for projectors within the structure and makes visible 3-Dimensional video replays of the final moments of the Engineers.

The replays show the oversized human beings, the Engineers, running through the structure, and yield valuable archaeological perspective of the events that led to the death of one of them, who tripped and was decapitated by a fast closing doorway. When David rapidly interprets the commands etched in a wall beside where this occurred, and opens the door, they find the actual large humanoid head of the Engineer behind it.

A rapidly approaching storm forces the crew to return to the Prometheus. Shaw insists they take the Engineer’s head back to the ship with them and they barely make it back alive. A biologist and geologist, Milburn and Fifield are stranded in the structure after becoming lost trying to find the way out.

David, the android, meanwhile, returns to Prometheus with one of the vases, while back in the structure, apparently induced by the presence of the away team, dozens of the remaining vases begin leaking black, gooey liquid. Small worm-like creatures are seen writhing in the goo – there’s life here. Upon entry the vases were dry and clean. Something about the entry of these people here has begun what is occurring with the vases, which the scientists told David to avoid.

David secretly bringing the vase back is the first of three covert acts that make us question his motivations.

In the ship, Shaw and medic Ford analyze the Engineer’s head, bringing it to life with electrostatic shock. They find some kind of disease, illness or growth on the surface of the head, which comes to life and endures a lifelike pain and exacerbation of the skin growth, eventually rupturing, causing the head to explode. “Mortal, after all,” remarks the android David.

Taking a sample of the tissue, Shaw discovers that the DNA of the Engineer is identical to that of the human race, confirming our relationship to these predecessors.

Note: this DNA match makes no sense whatsoever – if it is an exact match then, they would be, essentially us, and since they are in fact different from us in size, it seems likely there would be some difference in genetic structure.

Meanwhile, revealing an unnamed covert purpose, David investigates the vase he has secretly brought aboard and discovers a vial containing a black liquid.

David removes a drop of the black, organic goo within and puts it on his finger. There’s a beautiful ECU of David’s finger – instead of prints he has the Weyland logo subtly carved into his fingertip.

Earlier in the film, during stasis, we see David standing over the cryochambers and realize that he is able to see into the dreams of the sleeping passengers. Now, we see him again standing over a passenger. It is unclear who is within the chamber, but someone on the mission has not yet been awakened. David is communicating with the person in stasis.

Vickers confronts David about this, asking, “What did he say?” To which David initially responds “He” wouldn’t want David to tell her, but pressed by Vickers physically, responds the message from “him” was “Try harder.”

While it’s unclear to whom they’re referring, the fact that it’s Weyland, Vickers employer, who created David, is inescapable. Vickers intimacy implies a deeper connection between her and to whomever David is communicating.

David’s android reasoning is revealed further by this conversation; caught by his Master’s need for secrecy, he cannot lie to Vickers and yet cannot tell her the whole truth. This is the first of David’s conundra that result in unusual behavior.

Two Possible Directives Explaining David’s Behavior

Weyland is directing David to act from within the cryochamber via both some kind of direct communication and David’s ability to read the dreams of the sleeping passengers.

There are two basic directives:

1. to find a living Engineer; take Weyland to the Engineer, and convey Weyland’s wishes for immortality.

2. David is also being told to explore the organic goo and the parasitic creatures found aboard the Engineer’s ship – for the purposes of Weyland’s corporate goals.

These two directives are being interpreted by a first-generation, one-of-a-kind synthetic human, who:

a. is instructed by its maker to both function covertly and serve the mission of the Prometheus.

b. is a prototype and predecessor by 29 years of the android Ash, who was also programmed to act covertly in Alien aboard the Nostromo (which the Company calls a malfunction), and by 81 years of the softer, safer version of synthetic person, Bishop in Aliens.

c. has spent two years interpreting the dreams and thoughts of Weyland, Shaw and the entire crew bound to meet their maker, all while studying human culture and ancient human culture.

Long before the Prometheus arrives at LV-223, questions of identity abound for David.

Upon opening the vase and taking a drop of the liquid for his own analysis, David realizes that to follow through on the second directive he must infect a passenger.

David’s scene with Holloway in the billiard room is an excellent example of an android reasoning out how to proceed with the problem of his orders being covert. He asks Holloway a series of leading questions meant to bring Holloway to implicit approval of David’s plan to infect him.

The dialogue ends with David saying,”Then it’s time for a drink” – only then does David infect Holloway by briefly tapping the tiny black drop of the gooey substance on his finger into a glass of champagne he has poured.

Android reasoning – David gets Holloway’s tacit approval for experimenting upon him. It is subtle but clearly by design and only after a series of statements and questions that David allows himself to deposit the drop in Holloway’s glass.

Holloway downs it,”Here’s mud in yer eye, pal.” It’s such a Deckard line – most of my friends think it cheesy, I love it.

David predates Ash by 29 years and Bishop by 81 years. He is also a unique, a one-off – the first, a prototype. There is little compassion in him, little emotion. His quirk of having a fascination for one single human movie – Lawrence of Arabia – is hyper-constructed and yet gives him so little sweetness. The android is calculating and emotionless in 2093.

Shaw and the infected Holloway have sex. It is revealed that Shaw is sterile. Holloway follows her blindly and experiments wildly alongside. He loves Shaw and takes her as she is, a believer, a Christian, unable to bear children. He truly loves her and would be led by her to the end of the universe, to this Godforsaken place.

Holloway later looks in a mirror and sees his eyes are changing – mud in his eye – first evidence that he has been poisoned with the black goo by David. He still does not know how he came to be infected.

Meanwhile, trapped back inside the structure by the storm, Fifield and Milburn meet and are attacked by snake-like creatures which invade their suits, their skin and their minds. The slithery tentacle-like snakes have a bulbous head of folded skin that unfolds to reveal a triangular head with gaping mouth and teeth.

Note: just as in Alien, the first appearance of the ‘monster’ isn’t until one hour and one minute into the film. Scott’s blueprint is intact.

The snakes penetrate first the suit and then the skin of Milburn, who is killed, and perhaps made a host for an embryo – the snake goes into his mouth. A corrosive fluid (yellow acid blood) from one of the creatures melts Fifield’s helmet, exposing him to the dark liquid leaking from the vases. The “acid for blood” immediately recalls to mind the facehugger in Alien.

The crew returns to the Engineer’s structure after the storm passes to find Milburn’s corpse and no sign of Fifield.

David, meanwhile, separates from the others and discovers an immense cargo hold filled with the goo-filled vases. Though he is connected digitally to the Prometheus and specifically to Vickers, David intentionally severs this connection, revealing for the second time a covert intent.

In another room David discovers a living Engineer in stasis and video replays that allow him to see a holographic star map of the universe. The map highlights Earth.

Then David discovers the bridge of what is obviously a spacecraft. We’ve seen this huge, C-shaped ship with a giant chair in it already. It’s the one occupied by the skeletal remains of an oversized humanoid pilot with its rib cage pushed out in Alien and Aliens.

David learns how to operate the craft from the videos of the extinct Engineers, and how to liberate the living Engineer from cryostasis. He does all of this alone, cut off from the Prometheus, adding to the aforementioned covert mystique.

This is a trillion-dollar, private, corporate expedition and there are unseen hands at play – the undead Peter Weyland is acting through the robot David. We come to realize that Weyland is in cryogenic stasis and that David has been communicating with him throughout. The agent behind David’s covert activity becomes more clear.

David can thus be seen as part of a progression in robot design over 81 years – from David to Ash in 29 years of development and from Ash to Bishop in 57 more years. But he is also the first, a unique, like HAL. Weyland’s crowning achievement in synthetic people, like HAL, is subject to philosophizing, wonderment, and devious, purposeful action in the pursuit of its directives.

Holloway’s infection rapidly ravages his body, and he is rushed back to the ship. Shaw doesn’t understand why he is sick and no one else is. As he visibly deteriorates, Vickers, holding a flamethrower and standing at the ramp to the Prometheus refuses to let Holloway aboard. Holloway is in immense pain and finally he steps forward demanding she kill him. Vickers immolates him at his request.

Shaw is shattered, and stunned because she does not know how her lover was exposed singularly. She doesn’t know David gave him the black goo in his champagne. She doesn’t understand what is happening. Her naivety takes its major slam in the face. This, of course, is very reminiscent of Ripley’s experience in the Alien films and it’s horrifying and emotional.

To make matters much worse, a medical scan reveals that Shaw, despite being sterile, is in an advanced state of pregnancy impregnated with an alien creature that in 10 hours has grown to the size of a basketball and is still growing, all as a result of having sex with Holloway who has been poisoned by David with the black goo. David – removed, eerie, in the revelatory moment says, “Well, Doctor Shaw, it’s hardly a traditional fetus,” then – HAL-like, Ash-like – attempts to subdue her.

One feels obvious parallels here: Weyland has instructed David to return Shaw to Earth in stasis as a container for the creature which he considers a biological weapon. It’s exactly what the Company, Ash and Burke hope to do with Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo and Ripley and Newt, in 30 and again 87 years in the future from these events.

But Shaw, like Ripley, escapes and uses an automated surgery pod to cut a cephalopod-like creature from her abdomen. It’s a female parallel to crewman Kane’s stomach-rip in Alien in some weird way.

The scene is epic: The robotic, automated surgery chamber, a gurney in a tube, uses spray-on anaesthetic, robotic hands and metal clamps to fold back Elizabeth’s belly skin. A small robotic crane enters her exposed gut and brings out the placenta-covered, squid-like creature which then emerges, alive, spraying pre-birth from within its amniotic sac all over her. The machine closes Shaw with a staple gun, while the tentacled squid-thing flops angrily above her, held tenuously by the robotic crane arm.

Note: The idea that a machine capable of conducting such COMPLEX, delicate operations on human beings would somehow not be designed for males and females is ridiculous.

Shaw escapes crawling out from under it and, stumbling around like a little girl who has had everything horrible revealed to her, discovers Peter Weyland alive, sitting calmly on a bed, being waited upon by his doting robot.

Shaw realizes Weyland has been alive the whole time in stasis aboard the ship. She finds him and the cold, bemused David – who considers her resilient for surviving the implantation of an alien within her – preparing to meet the Engineer.

David is an excellent predecessor to the androids Ash and Bishop of Alien and Aliens, colder, more calculated, less concerned about human beings than either. He dotes on his creator, who made him singularly and treats him like a son.

Weyland and David explain to Shaw that Weyland intends to ask the Engineer to help him avoid his impending death. The subtle devotion that David has for Weyland, the blind following, reveals much about his actions in the film thus far.

Outside the Prometheus, a mutated Fifield attacks the hangar bay and kills several crew members before being killed himself. Janek sees what is happening and theorizes that this moon is actually a facility where the Engineers designed weapons. He proposes it was a military base until they lost control of their biological weapon: the vases and the black fluid they contain.

Vickers attempts to stop Weyland from going through with his plan. She tells him he will be killed. Weyland is stoic even as, in departing, Vickers calls him father and the connections are all made clear. Weyland’s invented a son in David and abandoned his connection to his daughter. Vickers grew up hating the old man – something David takes to be normal in all humanity – “Doesn’t everybody hate their parents?” he asks Shaw.

Weyland, David, Shaw and Ford return to the structure to awaken the Engineer David discovered in cryogenic stasis. It becomes clear that the Engineer is occupying a space ship (the same design as the crashed alien space ship seen on LV-426 in Alien and Aliens). It’s a spaceship with a cargo hold filled with toxic chemical and biological weapons that can destroy whole worlds with parasitic aliens.

David shows Weyland, Shaw and Ford the bridge and cryo-chambers of the Engineer. He then wakes the Engineer from cryogenic sleep. This is the moment Weyland and Shaw have been waiting for: to meet our maker. But now, after all that has happened, each has very different requests.

The immense Engineer slowly comes to its wits from hypersleep and attempts to understand the small human beings before it. Shaw, realizing Janek is right, screams in English “Ask him what’s in his Cargo Hold?” Why is he taking it to Earth?” and then at the Engineer: “Why do you want to kill us? What have we done?”

Before the Engineer can respond, the selfish and decrepit Weyland has Shaw silenced to put forth his android, his son – the perfect specimen of human likeness, capable of speaking in multiple languages, indeed having translated those of the Engineer to learn the controls of the craft and its devices – to explain his purpose.

The Engineer responds by decapitating David and killing Weyland and Ford. Shaw escapes the alien ship as it is activated for launch by the Engineer. Weyland dies, pathetic, broken. Vickers, observing from aboard the Prometheus, and hearing the flatline confirming the death of her father Weyland, orders Janek to return to Earth.

The still-active David lies disembodied on the floor of the Engineer’s craft, but maintains contact with Shaw and now begins to tell what he knows. The craft begins to initiate take-off and Shaw is hurled from within the ship and crawls and runs across crevasses created by the launching of the immense craft.

It’s a scene that mimics the headless Ash being brought back to tell the crew of the Nostromo what is actually happening to them in Alien. David’s severed body and still-conversant head are similar to the final state of the android Bishop of Aliens as well, who ends divided yet able to cling to the floor of the Sulaco and grab Newt to save her from being thrown out the airlock. It’s as if the fate of all Scott’s androids is a milky decapitation.

David reveals to Shaw that the Engineer is starting up the ship and is intending to release the vases of black goo on Earth. She hears David and tries to warn Vickers and Janek that the ship is headed to Earth with the intention of killing off humanity.

Vickers, aboard the Prometheus, orders Janek to return to Earth, but this is the Captain’s shining moment. Janek, in a brief exchange with Shaw, assesses the threat to humanity if they allow the Engineer’s ship to leave. He defies Vickers and tells her to abandon ship if she doesn’t want to die. While Vickers flees in an escape pod, Janek and his crew, straight-forward, no-nonsense and generally non-involved in the mission throughout, save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the Engineer’s ship as it attempts to take off.

The disabled ship of the Engineer crashes onto the planet, falling onto Vickers, crushing her. The ship continues to tumble and nearly crushes Shaw, but she escapes.

Shaw goes to the escape pod to get oxygen and retrieve supplies and finds her alien offspring has grown to gigantic size. The Engineer survives the crash, enters the escape pod and attacks Shaw, who releases the tentacled creature. It subdues the Engineer by thrusting a tentacle down its throat. When the Engineer falls with the immense tentacled creature atop him, the creature looks very much like the “facehuggers” in the Alien films.

David, still functioning and decapitated, lying on the floor of the bridge of the downed spacecraft, communicates with Elizabeth Shaw who lies, crying on the moon’s rocky desolate surface. David says he would like her help, that if she can collect him and carry him, he could help here to leave this place because there are other crafts like this one on the moon.

Shaw recovers David’s remains from the alien ship, and asks if he can operate the craft. He responds that he can fly them back to Earth.

Shaw asks if he can fly them to the place of origin of the Engineers and he says that he can. Together they activate another Engineer ship. Shaw and the remains of android David then take off to travel to the Engineers’ homeworld in an attempt to understand why they created humanity and why they attempted to destroy it.

In the final shot, back in the Prometheus escape pod, the immense tentacled facehugger has died (just like the facehuggers do after implanting the embryos in Alien) and the Engineer’s body begins to convulse. From within his chest emerges an alien (very similar but not the same as seen in later movies) The creature bursts out of the dying Engineer’s chest and we see the mouth within a mouth and familiar head structure and body shape of the “chestburster” xenomorphs in Alien.

2122, the Alien plot – 29 Years After Events of Prometheus

The events of Alien (1979) take place June 3rd to 6th in the year 2122 A.D.

USCSS Nostromo encounters what is assumed to be a distress signal emanating from the planetoid designated LV-426, in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert investigate a derelict spacecraft that contains the fossilised remains of an unknown alien species, and thousands of Xenomorph eggs. One of the xenomorph spore (‘facehugger’) attaches itself to Kane’s face and plants an embryo in his throat, which then hatches, killing the host. The hatchling (‘chestburster’) grows to over 7 feet tall and kills Dallas and Engineer’s Mate Brett.

Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani want the Alien specimen and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. It is revealed Science Officer Ash is in fact a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, who has been protecting the Alien.

Chief Engineer Parker renders Ash inoperative when Ash attacks Ripley. Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien whilst evacuating the Nostromo. Ripley rigs the ship to self-destruct and escapes on the shuttlecraft Narcissus with the ship’s cat Mr Jones. The Alien also escapes on the shuttle, but Ripley manages to blow it out of the airlock, effectively killing it.

Plot Summary of Alien (1979)

(scenes in red are only in the Special Edition)

Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Chief Engineer Parker, and Engineering Technician Brett. When the story opens, the Nostromo is heading back to Earth.

A computer the crew calls “Mother” monitors the ship’s operations. Mother intercepts a strange signal from a nearby planetoid and wakens the crew. The crew believe at first that they’ve arrived at Earth, however, they quickly determine that they’re charged with investigating the strange signal, which is assumed to an SOS. Before they prepare the “tug” craft to land on the planet, crew members Brett and Parker argue that they’re not a rescue team and that they should be compensated for the extra work. Ash tells them that there is a portion of their working contract that states the crew must investigate any occurrences such as this one.

The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit); the landing is rough, causing repairable damage that will take some time to fix. Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal, walking through the planetoid’s inhabitable atmosphere. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin, losing contact with the Nostromo upon entering the massive ship. Inside they find the remains of an enormous alien creature in the pilot chair, now fossilized. There is a hole in its ribcage, indicating that something burst out from inside its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley’s analysis of the unidentified transmission reveals that it is not an SOS, but a warning. Ripley wants to go after the search party but Ash talks her out of it.

Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot’s chair, discovering thousands of leathery objects that resemble large eggs. He also discovers a strange mist covering the eggs that reacts when broken. Moving in to investigate further, Kane illuminates one of the eggs from behind with a flashlight & discovers movement inside; a strange, spider-like organism is the resident. The egg opens, and as Kane moves into for a better look, the strange life form inside leaps out, dissolves the visor of Kane’s spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face.

Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, who is the commanding officer in the absence of Dallas and Kane, refuses to let them back on board, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley’s decision and lets them in.

In the infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face, but they discover they cannot because it will tear Kane’s skin off. Kane is examined with sophisticated equipment which shows that the creature has inserted a tube into his throat and is feeding Kane oxygen despite his comatose state. Dallas makes the decision to remove the creature from Kane’s face, no matter the consequences.

When Ash tries to cut off one of its legs, a yellowish fluid pours out and begins to eat through the floor. Dallas is concerned that the acidic fluid will breach the hull, but it stops it’s corrosive effects. Dallas says the substance resembles molecular acid, and Brett comments the creature must be using it for blood. ‘Wonderful defense mechanism – you don’t dare kill it’, Parker growls. Kane is left in his coma and is tended to by Ash.

Ripley later confronts Ash about his defiance of her orders and allowing the alien organism onto their ship, which put all of their lives at risk. She distrusts him, as well as his seeming inability to give them any useful information about the creature. The damage to the tug is repaired by Brett and Parker, and the crew takes off and docks with the refinery & cargo in orbit. The Nostromo then resumes its course for Earth.

Eventually, the creature detaches from Kane’s face on its own and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal, Kane begins to choke and convulse. While he lies on the table & the crew try to aid him, a new alien creature bursts from his chest. Parker moves in to kill it with a knife, and is stopped by Ash. The creature then scurries away, leaving the crew stunned and horrified.

After a short funeral for Kane, the crew members split up into two teams to capture the small creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew’s cat, Jones.

Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch Jones. As he searches for Jones, Brett finds a mysterious object that appears to be skin on the floor. He continues on, eventually catching up to Jones in a huge room. As he tries to coax Jones out, the cat hisses as a huge shape drops down behind the engineer. It is the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it attacks him, dragging him, bloodied and screaming, into an air shaft. In the 2003 re-release of the film, Ripley and Parker hear him and arrive in time to catch a glimpse of the monster as Brett disappears.

The crew debate their next move. Ripley again questions Ash and his inability to give them helpful information. They all agree that the alien is using the air shafts to move around, so Dallas enters the network of air shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien’s signal, but the signal vanishes, leaving Dallas unsure of the creature’s location. He finds the alien’s slime on the tunnel floor. Dallas is disoriented in the cramped space and starts to panic when the signal returns, indicating it is heading directly for him. In his attempt to escape, he runs right into the creature. The remaining crew members find only his flamethrower left behind.

Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that “the company” (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as “Weyland-Yutani”) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien creatures brought back for study, considering the crew expendable. This information is related in just four screen shots of text from Mother – an excellent scene.

Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company’s “Special Order”, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. Parker dislodges Ash’s head with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash is an android. With Ash disabled, Ripley and the others reconnect his disembodied head to see if he can give them any advice on how to deal with the creature. Ash tells them they have no chance against it, as it is “the perfect organism”.

Ripley decides to follow Lambert’s earlier suggestion; set the Nostromo to self-destruct & escape in the shuttle, leaving the Alien to die on the Nostromo. As they leave the room, Parker turns the flamethrower on Ash’s corpse to ensure he will not be re-activated and come after them. While Ripley preps the shuttle for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle’s life-support system.

On the ship’s open intercom system, Ripley hears the cat and realizes Jones has been left behind. Alone, she goes out into the hallways of the Nostromo to find him. Expecting the alien at every turn, Ripley finally locates the cat and puts him into his traveling container. She then hears the sounds of the alien attacking Parker and Lambert in another part of the ship, and Parker shouting orders to Lambert to get out of the way. The alien corners Lambert against a wall, but Parker is unable to get a clear shot at it with the flamethrower without killing Lambert. Finally he charges at the creature, but it spins on him and kills him with its bizarre inner jaws. It then turns back to Lambert and Ripley hears the sounds of it killing her as she rushes to try and save her friends. Ripley finds the bodies of Parker & Lambert in the storage room they had been working in, and then races back towards the bridge.

In another restored scene, Ripley finds Dallas in a storage chamber. He has been cocooned by the alien in an unidentifiable substance (the creature’s secretions) and very weakly begs Ripley to kill him. Ripley also sees Brett, already dead, whom appears to be transforming into another of the species’ eggs. Ripley burns them both with the flamethrower and rushes out of the chamber.

Ripley realizes she is now alone on board the Nostromo with the alien. She activates the ship’s self-destruct and races to the shuttle with Jones’ cat carrier. As she rounds the bend to the shuttle entrance, the alien suddenly leaps up, blocking her path. Ripley drops the cat carrier and backs up, racing back to abort the self-destruct function. Arriving at the bridge, she restarts the cooling unit, but ‘Mother’ states that it is too late to stop the countdown and the Nostromo will explode in 5 minutes.

Ripley returns to the shuttle loading area, ready to make her best attempt to fight off the alien and get to the lifeboat. The alien is nowhere to be seen, so Ripley and Jones board the shuttle with 1 minute to abandon ship. Quickly running through the launch sequence, the shuttle lowers to launch position as ‘Mother’ starts counting down the last 30 seconds of the Nostromo‘s life. The shuttle’s engines ignite and the ship races away from the Nostromo, which grows smaller by the second. A series of mighty explosions follow as the Nostromo vanishes in fire, destroying the refinery and ore it had been carrying – and apparently destroying the alien.

As Ripley prepares for hypersleep, a hand reaches out to her from a wall; the alien had in fact stowed away aboard the shuttle, its external physicality making it blend in with the ship’s machinery. She retreats to a locker with a pressure suit inside, and gets an idea. Ripley dons the spacesuit & arms herself with a gun & grappling hook, then straps herself into a chair. Opening a series of air vents above the alien’s head, Ripley tests them one at a time, and then finds one that directly blasts high-pressure steam onto the alien, driving it from its hiding spot. As the monster stands to its full, menacing 2-meter height, ready to attack with its piston-like inner throat & teeth, she opens the shuttle’s airlock, blasting the creature into space with the grappling gun. The door slams shut, trapping the alien outside.

Undaunted, the alien attempts to re-enter the ship by climbing inside one of the heat thrusters. Ripley sees the opportunity and fires the engines, incinerating the alien. Before she and Jones enter hypersleep for the trip home, Ripley records a log entry stating that she’s the last survivor of the Nostromo.

2179, the Aliens plot, 57 Years Later

The events of Aliens (1986) take place 57 years after the events of Alien (1979) in the years 2179 – 2182 and again on the planet LV-426.

Here’s the Plot Summary for Aliens

Explaining Prometheus and the 'Alien' Timeline